Confessions of a Tax Collector (19 page)

The party was well under way at The Cellar by the time I arrived a little after eleven. I kissed Pam on the cheek and apologized.

”I fell asleep.“

”Rick can’t stay awake past nine,“ she said to no one in particular. No one in particular seemed to be listening.

”I get up at four,“ I said.

”Why does Rick get up at four?“ someone asked. So at least one person had been listening. Probably an informant. Culpepper had not said if Inspection did any follow-up after you were hired.

”Rick gets up at four o’clock in the morning?“ someone else said.

”He goes to Denny’s and writes for a couple hours,“ Pam said, ”Or so he says.“

”What the hell else would he be doing at four o’clock in the morning?“

The waitress stopped by the table. I ordered a beer and lit a cigarette.

”Do you have to?“ Pam asked. I took it as a rhetorical question and jettisoned the smoke into the air above me. Robert Palmer’s ”Addicted to Love“ was blaring from the jukebox behind us. She leaned over and hissed in my ear, ”You look like shit. Couldn’t you have at least changed your clothes?“

”You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Rick in a tie,“ someone said.

”He looks like he’s on his way to a funeral.“

”I overslept; I told you,“ I said to Pam.

”You need a haircut.“

”Must we dwell on my personal grooming, Red?“

She had recently allowed a friend from the theater (who was a hairdresser in his day job) to redo her hair. He had dyed it flaming red and spiked the top punk rocker-style. She had asked me what I thought of it, and I was forced to answer, ”It’s... challenging.“ Pam was a restless experimenter when it came to her hair. Since we had been together, she had gone through four distinct hairstyles, varying length, color, cut, curl. Her natural color was a mousy brown.

I forged on. ”Heard a funny story today about a guy who liked to pee his pants,“ I said to the group, but only Pam was listening.

”Is it as funny as the guy whose dog got arrested for rape?“

”That dog wasn’t arrested, it was reprimanded... no, it isn’t that funny. It’s between that and the one about the guy’s twelve-year-old sticking his penis in the vacuum cleaner hose.“

”That’s not funny. It’s disgusting.“

”Hey, guess what I found out today.“

”They’ve repealed the income tax.“

”No.“

”Darn.“

”Inspection investigated my application.“

”What’s that mean?“

”Means they talked to people.“

”Which people?“

I studied her carefully. Culpepper had a theory that you could always tell if a taxpayer was lying by watching the pupils. The pupil will contract during a lie, hiding from the light... The lighting was too dim for gauging pupil contraction. I took her hand to see if her palms were dry.

”They don’t tell you. Culpepper hinted they talk to everyone.“

”Everyone?“

”Everyone.“

I waited. She extracted her hand from mine and picked up her wineglass. She sipped her wine and looked away.

Laughter exploded at the other end of the table. Tom Foster, an electronics salesman by day, actor by night, and possessor of a magnificent baritone in precise inverse proportion to his acting ability, was regaling those about him with one of his off-color jokes, of which he had inexhaustible supply. Tom was thirty-three years old and still lived with his mother. I thought of Culpepper’s remark about my ”faggot theater crowd.“ Looking around the table, I took an inventory of those who were definitely out of the closet, those still in, and those still wavering at the threshold. At least half. All were my good friends, the people I had always been the most comfortable with. I loosened my tie, rolled up my sleeves, and determined I would enjoy myself and not think about Inspection knocking on their doors and asking intimate questions about my personal life. So what if one or two at the table were giving me the eye? Or that each had turned slightly away in their chairs, or that a pair at the end of the table were whispering when Robert Palmer hardly made whispering necessary?

The waitress returned with my beer. The alcohol had an immediate, dizzying effect: I hadn’t eaten since lunch. I looked about the room as it began to spin, and enjoyed the babble; it was a pleasant white noise. Pam asked why I was so quiet. I told her I had a bad day at work. She replied I always had a bad day at work. I said this day was particularly bad: Culpepper called me a little fuck and accused my friends of being sodomites. I told her about the DIAL briefing. She asked what the hell a DIAL briefing was. I tried to explain what a DIAL briefing was. She lost interest and struck up a conversation with Carl, the theater’s technical director. I lit another cigarette and leaned over to speak to Pam’s brother, who also acted in his spare time, looking directly into his eyes: ”Time is a river and I have run the shoals!“

”What?“

”I said—has anyone from the IRS ever talked to you?“

”Just you.“

I couldn’t say with absolute certainty, but it appeared the pupil of his right eye contracted, ever so slightly, as he said it.

Pam drank too much and I insisted on driving her home. We would pick up her car in the morning. ”You’ll be late for work.“ ”It’s okay.“

”Don’t they break your thumbs for that?“ ”No. The knees. But it’s just one knee the first time.“ We had a terrible fight during the drive home. She was sick of my obsessing over the job. I had lost weight. I was smoking too much. I ignored her. She never saw me and when she did she didn’t understand what I was talking about, when I decided to talk, because all I talked about was work. ”You know, my husband had a very stressful job and he didn’t bring it home with him every night.“

”No, he kept it all inside until it exploded his brain.“

She hit me in the shoulder as hard as she could. She told me I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. I told her I resented her bringing up her dead husband at every opportunity; it was as if I were in competition with a corpse. I repeated my long-held belief that she had elevated his death into a kind of martyrdom; that his death had somehow transformed him into a saint beyond emulation; and that the reason she wouldn’t marry me had nothing to do with my inability to provide a stable income or a lack of maturity, but had everything to do with the fact that she was still in love with him.

She screamed at me to stop the car. She threw open her door. I slammed on the brakes, throwing her forward. Her head almost smacked the dashboard. She fell out the open door, onto the road. It was one o’clock in the morning; we were on a road that wound its way through orange groves, about three miles from the house. She slammed the door and began to run, her crimson tresses swinging behind her. I pulled up beside her and called to her through the open window.

”Get in the car!“

”Fuck you!“

”Rational people do not leap from moving cars!“

”Okay. Okay.“ I was keeping pace with her as she walked rapidly upon the roadside. ”So I’m irrational. I’m hysterical. I’m fucked up, Rick, so what are you gonna do about it?“

”I don’t know what I can do about it.“

”No, of course you don’t know what to do. Poor Rick. Poor, passive little Rick, never knowing what to do. You know what I want you to do? Would that help, if I told you what I wanted you to do?“

”It might.“

”All I wanted, Rick, all I ever wanted was somebody to take care of me.“

”Why do you think I took this fucking job in the first place?“

”Oh, don’t fool yourself, Rick. You taking this job had nothing to do with me.“

”Pam, please, get in the car.“

She stopped. Her head was bowed; I couldn’t see her face. Her chest heaved. She climbed back into the car.

”Can’t we go back?“

She wasn’t talking about the house we shared. I turned and stared straight ahead through the windshield, idling by the side of the road.

”No,“ I said. My voice was thick from cigarettes and lack of sleep.

”Why? Why not, Rick?“

”Because I have to finish this. I can’t afford another failure, Pam.“ I was thinking of my SF-171, how I had to attach extra pages to include all my little jobs over the past ten years—except the telemarketing gig—all the rotten places I had lived in. ”If I fail at this, I’m done.“

”Oh,“ she said. ”The drama.“

”I have to prove to myself I’m not a failure.“

”And that’s what success at the IRS would prove?“

”Pam, I don’t even know what success at the IRS means.“

”And if I told you to choose, to quit or move out, what do you think that would mean?“

I told her I didn’t know what that would mean, either. There were no streetlights on this narrow two-lane road that curved lazily through the groves, its edges crumbing into the soft Florida soil. The darkness seemed to press against the beams of my headlamps, twisting them into taut ribbons of light. My hands tightened on the wheel. The river’s current was strong and deep, and there was no shore in sight.

I received my write-up from Culpepper two weeks later. This review was the benchmark of my first six months with the Service. Overall, Culpepper was pleasantly surprised by my progress. He felt I made sound case decisions, conducted thorough research—though not, he noted, exhaustive. I did a good job protecting taxpayer rights, whatever those might be; in those days, protecting a taxpayers’ rights meant handing them Publication One on first contact. During one group meeting, while Gina was reminding everyone of the necessity of issuing Pub One, Culpepper rolled one into a tube and mimed shoving it up a taxpayer’s ass.

He found me lacking in two key areas: protecting the governments interest and inventory management. This was code. It meant I wasn’t enforcing (I had yet to make a seizure) and I was overworking cases.

”You kept this TDI
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over five weeks,” he told me in my postreview debriefing. His mood was better. He was wearing his yellow tie. Culpepper’s moods were often reflected in his choice of neckwear. “It’s pretty obvious on the face of it this TP’s out of business. Don’t beat a dead horse. You did everything required by the manual to locate them. You couldn’t find them, so it should have been closed.”

“I’ll have it on your desk by close of business today,” I promised.

He nodded. “I’ve told you before, we don’t pay you to close cases in your training year. We pay you to learn the job. But—close cases. You must close cases. That’s what impresses management, or are you not interested in impressing management?”

“I’m interested.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

He arched one eyebrow. “Really. Okay. The second thing that impresses management is seizures. To rise in this organization you must conduct seizures. Do you know why that is?”

“Statistics?”

“Oh, Jesus, you are growing, Yancey. You are evolving before my eyes. Pretty soon the chrysalis will split open and out will spew the butterfly.”

“Spew?”

“Remember the fourth protocol. Any fucking Grade Seven sitting in Jacksonville can issue a levy. A Grade Five can file a lien. Only a revenue officer can seize. You must make that decision on a case-by-case basis, of course, but at some point, some
near and immediate
point in the future, you must conduct a seizure. It doesn’t matter what you seize. Remember, you can always
make
equity.” He grew wistful. “You know, in the old days we used to issue a summons and when the taxpayer showed up at the office we would seize his car. One person would take him into the booth and two others would go outside, find it, and sticker it. Didn’t matter if it was ten years old riding on its rims… didn’t even matter if they drove something like
your
car. In the old days, we didn’t even need a consent. If we walked into the place and they pissed us off in the least, we would go, ‘That’s it, you’re seized, asshole.’”

“Okay.”

“You know, Allison has already done two seizures.”

“I know.”

“You have not done any. Do you think your inventory is qualitatively different from hers?”

“No.”

“Do you believe you just happen to have the one set of thirty-five taxpayers that does not require seizure action?”

“I doubt it.”

“Very good. Let’s see. You’re off to Phase Two in another four weeks. I want a seizure package on my desk twice a week, that’s eight seizures before you go to Phase Two. That should keep Allison on her toes.”

“I’ll… I’ll look over my cases.”

“That Marsh case would be a good place to start.”

“She’s sending me money. Gina signed the IA.
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”

“Is she current?”

“I’m monitoring that.”

“Okay. So…is she?”

“Yes.”

“Hmmmm.” He brushed an imaginary wrinkle from his tie. “Speaking of Allison, in the future I would watch what I said to her.”

A chill ran down the middle of my spine. “Why’s that?”

“She does not have your best interest at heart. Things can get pretty nasty when promotions are on the line. They can also get nasty when they’re
not,
and I would hate to see you strike out before you’ve even stepped up to the plate.”

“I’m not following you, Culpepper.”

“Christ, Yancey, aren’t you the dramatist, the expert on the human condition and all that shit? Little Miss Allison doesn’t just want Gina’s job. She wants Gina’s boss’s
boss’s
job. And there is very little she will stop short of to get it.”

My throat had gone bone-dry.

“In the future, I would be careful what I said to her. I would not pass on any personal opinions about my coworkers, my OJI, or my supervisor. Particularly my supervisor and my OJI. I would not criticize, mock, imitate, or tattle. Particularly tattle.”

He smiled. His attitude toward me bordered on the paternal. If he could have reached me from across the table, he would have hugged me, stroked my brow, told me it was going to be all right. “Just remember what I told you. She cannot be trusted. I’ve seen it get really bad. There was one office where no one dared leave a check unattended on their desk: someone would snatch it and shred it. Or the receipt book. Do you know where your 809 book is?”